Bring SFTP to OS-X: Magnetk ExpanDrive

Posted on: April 11, 2008

Today is a great day for Macintosh users! Magnetk has released
ExpanDrive - a tool allowing to
mount remote servers as local drives over ssh/sftp. Their press-release
promises to add more protocols. I am taking a not-so-wild guess here
that S3 will be one of the first protocols to get in.

But back to Magnetk. In the past I have used the Windows version of the
same tool they had - SftpDrive and have come to love it. It was actually
one of the few things I used to miss from Windows. I remember e-mailing
them and asking to give us, Mac users something like that, as well. They
promptly e-mailed back saying it was in works. And here we are with
ExpanDrive! Magnetk is clearly a company that lives up to its promises.

I have been evaluating ExpanDrive for couple hours now and it is
AWESOME!. I am gonna try it for a day or two more and am definitely
buying it.

P.S. To be completely fair, we have to mention that there is an
open-source tool that aims at solving the same problem and it has been
around for a while: MacFuse is its
name. I have used it.

Well, quite honestly bare-naked MacFuse is not in the same league, at
least for now (I suspect ExpanDrive is using MacFuse at least partially
if not in its totality). I am always the first to favor an open-source
alternative, but quite honestly, if you are serious about your SFTP
needs (like: developing a web application on a remote server),
ExpanDrive is well worth its modest price.